Bob and I hadn’t hiked together once since Sam’s death, and I’d been looking forward to it for weeks.

Twenty minutes before he was supposed to pick me up, the phone rang. The answering machine clicked on and I stood beside it, listening to Bob leave a message about how there was a running race happening on Bridgeway and a bunch of streets were blocked off and it was going to be a nightmare for him to make it over to Mill Valley and yadda yadda yadda, he was sorry but he wasn’t coming.

“We’ll go before the summer’s over,” he said. “I promise.”

I picked up the receiver and slammed it down as hard as I could. The asshole never even wished me a happy birthday.

And he wasn’t fooling me. He lived one measly town south of Mill Valley, and sitting in a little traffic in order to spend time with your kid on his birthday didn’t seem like too much to ask.

Over the years, being lonely has become the standard for me. It feels normal now, like a bad leg wound that turned into a permanent limp, and I accept it. But back then loneliness was a new, excruciating state of being, and there were only two things that made me feel less alone. One was playing guitar and the other was being in the woods, and that day I opted to spend my time doing both. I was going to hike as planned, and I was going to take my guitar with me, Bob Harper be damned.

I had filled my backpack with what Bob told me to pack when he thought he would be coming: two turkey sandwiches, a couple cans of Dr Pepper, iced oatmeal cookies, and a canteen full of water.

When I realized Bob wouldn’t be accompanying me, I added my portable CD player, a couple CDs, and a small notepad and pen, in case I got lost and had to ask for directions. Then I grabbed my guitar and headed out.

The beginning of the trail was a ten-minute walk from my house, and from there it was another mile to where I wanted to eat. When I finally got to the spot, my arm was sore and tired from lugging the guitar all the way there. I sat at an empty picnic table near Poseidon, took everything out of my pack, and set it up like I was having a party.

I was trying to pretend that it was fine for a kid to celebrate his birthday by himself, but my heart hurt like someone had hammered nails into it, and when I inhaled it felt like my breath had nowhere to go, like I could suffocate from all that solitude. That’s when I started fantasizing about killing Bob. I figured if he died I could forgive him for ditching me on my birthday.

The best idea I could come up with—and by “best” I mean the idea that seemed least likely to look like foul play—was pushing Bob off the deck of his houseboat. It was built right over the water and had a simple wooden railing that was designed to let the view of the bay and city in but, if tampered with, would not be good at keeping an asshole father from falling out. And if he fell at low tide in only a couple inches of water, it would be like hitting cement.